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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Book Review: Mount's 'Caesars' Examines How Wannabe Dictators Rise and Fall

A new book looks at how Julius Caesar’s legacy informs the strongmen of today.

By Daniel W. Drezner | December 10, 2023

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/10/mount-big-little-casears-book-rev
iew-wannabe-dictators-johnson-trump/

We appear to be living in an age of aspiring Caesars.

Consider Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and, of course, former U.S. President Donald Trump. All were democratically elected in political systems with varying degrees of freedom and fairness. All weaponized their newfound state control in attempts to preserve their respective grips on power. Though some were more successful than others at doing so, all of these leaders weakened the democratic regimes that facilitated their rise.

This plague of wannabe strongmen is the topic of Ferdinand Mount’s Big Caesars and Little Caesars. To use a Britishism, Mount is a classic “wet Tory” who mixes establishment values with more liberal politics. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church college at the University of Oxford. He holds a family baronetcy; that family includes his first cousin once removed, former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron. Mount headed up then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit in the 1980s before losing faith in Thatcherite ideological zeal. He subsequently edited the Times Literary Supplement in the 1990s and has taken to writing for the Daily Telegraph and the London Review of Books in this century.

The first words of his text are these: “Caesars are back, big Caesars and little Caesars, in big countries and little countries, in advanced nations and backward nations.”

From that Seussian opening, Mount’s book explores the concept of Caesarism and Caesars in politics: what causes their rise, and what causes their downfall. In Mount’s telling, a Caesar is an aspiring dictator intent on destroying existing institutions and establishing themselves as the maker and breaker of laws. Big Caesars differ from little Caesars in their ambition and their success. For Mount, where big Caesars distinguish themselves is that “their violence, their law-breaking, their lying, are on a huge, often limitless scale,” whereas little Caesars “go only as far as they need to” in rigging the system to suit their ambitions.

The subtitle of Mount’s book is “How they rise and how they fall—from Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson.” This captures one possible problem with the book before it even begins: The text mixes analysis of dictators such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler with the likes of Johnson, the erstwhile British prime minister. The former are most definitely big Caesars, while it is hard to view Johnson as anything but a little Caesar. Fortunately, the book tackles this disparity well: As Mount explains, “the tricks and techniques [are] common to all Caesars, big and little. … They all operate along the same spectrum.”

Chapters exploring episodes such as the 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy—when a small group of radical activists plotted (and failed) to behead the entire British cabinet—or the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich—in which Hitler’s fledgling Nazi Party attempted to forcibly overthrow the Weimar Republic—demonstrate how close tin-pot dictators can become to the real thing. Caesarism that might be viewed as “little” in the West, such as Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency that lasted from 1975 to 1977, had serious repercussions. Gandhi’s moves had costs in the short term in the form of mass arrests and forced sterilizations designed by Gandhi’s son Sanjay to limit population growth. According to Mount, in the long-term, Gandhi’s actions provided an illiberal precedent for Modi to exploit.

In the case of Hitler, history repeats itself, first as farce and then as tragedy. His failed, illegal putsch paved the way for a trial that captured the public’s attention. After being pardoned from a prison sentence, Hitler pursued multiple tracks to power, combining electoral successes with street violence that intimidated opposing parties.

That history can rhyme this jarringly is worth remembering as Trump, the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination, seeks to return to the White House.

All wannabe Caesars rely heavily on the ability of propaganda to crowd out more factual history, Mount shows. Caesars conjure convenient narratives to sell to both their loyalists and to the key elites who they need to co-opt to acquire power. As Mount puts it, “time and propaganda sandpaper the rough edges, and the brutal and ruthless methods by which they seized power [are] explained away as unavoidable necessities.”

Sometimes the Caesars can do this with their own writing, as Napoleon did in his dispatches from the front, or as Hitler did with Mein Kampf. Even Caesars who lack wordsmithing capabilities can outsource the narrative to supportive publicists. Beside every aspiring Caesar is a malignant toady eager to write their “Flight 93 Election” essay, arguing that a political situation is so dire that extreme tactics, emergency measures, and unholy alliances are a justified route to acquiring power.

The best attribute of Big Caesars and Little Caesars is that more than half of the book focuses on Caesars’ downfalls. Mount posits that a combination of law enforcement, intelligence, eloquence, legality, and diligence by public officials will lead wannabe Caesars to their inevitable ruin. It is precisely because of the power of propaganda that an examination of Caesars’ decline and fall is necessary—otherwise, ordinary citizens might exaggerate these leaders’ political potency.

For example, Trump and his supporters like to present the so-called Make America Great Again movement as an unstoppable force. This spin elides some inconvenient facts. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes; he lost the 2020 popular vote by more than double that number. The two midterm elections that have occurred since Trump stormed the national stage led to serious setbacks for the Republican Party. Trump currently faces four criminal indictments, and many of his followers and subordinates are being prosecuted as well. Pointing out how aspiring Caesars exit the political stage is crucial to puncturing the fear that their enduring victory is inevitable.

Mount’s efforts at persuasion are hampered by several flaws in his book’s presentation. The most obvious is his barely concealed desire to intellectually murder Johnson just to watch him die. Johnson’s role in campaigning for and then completing Brexit is a source of considerable ire for Mount, as are Johnson’s myriad other official peccadilloes.

It could be argued that Johnson won both the United Kingdom’s 2016 Brexit referendum and 2019 general election, democratically earning the right to make catastrophic policy mistakes. Mount will have none of this. He argues that the pro-Brexit campaign was an unholy mix of nationalism and what he calls “cakeism”—Johnson promising Britons that they could have their cake and eat it, too. As for Johnson’s 2019 electoral win, Mount asks derisively but fairly: “Had it really been such a brilliant triumph to wallop a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn?”

Despite some valid points, the book suffers from its excessive focus on the little Caesar with the bad hair. Mount goes to far as to claim that “[t]here has been no more humiliating exit in British political history” than when Johnson exited No. 10 Downing St. in September 2022, mired in scandal.

Johnson’s exit was far from graceful, but that claim is risible. Johnson was replaced by Liz Truss, a policy and political trainwreck whose time as prime minister was limited to 49 chaotic days, the shortest premiership in British history. (Mount acknowledges this fact just one page after claiming Johnson’s exit was the most humiliating, raising questions about his—or his editor’s—short-term memory.)

A larger problem is that readers outside of the United Kingdom will feel a bit left out in the sections devoted to Johnson. Between that and a few other chapters devoted to Caesarism elsewhere in the world, half the book is about narrow corners of British history.

Unfortunately, when Mount crosses the pond to train his eye on the United States’ little Caesar, Trump, other flaws emerge. Like many English writers, Mount presents an air of political savvy about U.S. politics—but the moment that Big Caesars and Little Caesars tries to get specific about the United States, his grasp fades.

He writes, “In the United States, voter suppression is widespread and of long standing – sufficiently so to be referred to simply as VS.” I have taught political science for more than a quarter-century, and I have never once heard that acronym used for that purpose; my Americanist friends were also baffled.

Mount also claims that Trump’s first travel ban applied to “immigrants from most Muslim nations.” That executive order, while bigoted and counterproductive, was limited to seven countries; the Organization of Islamic Cooperation counts 57 member states. Mount concludes that what made Trump’s presidency unique was his nonstop campaigning and chaotic governing style, betraying his ignorance of Andrew Jackson’s 19th-century rise to the presidency.

Mount’s saddest error is when he dismisses Trump’s current campaign pledge to fire many executive branch bureaucrats because “no conceivable U.S. Congress would pass such a law.” That may be true, but it is also irrelevant; as president, Trump’s ability to run roughshod over the civil service was viable enough to prompt considerable discussion inside the Beltway about its implications. The threat now is big enough that the Biden administration has taken actions to make it more difficult for presidential successors to do what Trump wants to do.

Mount’s grasp on the global Caesar phenomenon is equally unsteady. He claims that Johnson and Trump were unique Caesars in focusing their ire on immigration, but that elides how Hungary’s Orban and Turkey’s Erdogan exploited fears of refugee flows to consolidate their holds on public office. More generally, Mount claims that “modern Caesarism has remained a strangely neglected subject” by scholars, which betrays an ignorance about recent and not-so-recent turns in political science scholarship. Over the past decade, social scientists have increased their focus on the role of individual leaders in world politics. The surge of research into populist nationalism has similarly exploded since the emergence of Trump and Brexit.

There is no entry for “populism” in Mount’s index, which might explain why he thinks no one has been paying attention to modern Caesars. Mount is interested in the leaders of these movements and how they rise to power; political scientists are more interested in the movements themselves, as well as their underlying causes. They are analyzing the same phenomenon, but from somewhat different angles. Mount writes that “Caesars become popular above all by raising national morale rather than by improving living standards” and that the “incoming Caesar loses no time in setting up an opposition between Us and Them.” These are both Populism 101 lessons.

Still, focusing on the Caesars themselves has some value; there is no denying that populist leaders often display peculiar psychologies. Those interested in how someone such as Boris Johnson could have been responsible for what was possibly the greatest foreign-policy own-goal in Great Britain’s history would do well to read Mount’s book.

Down load the free book Big Caesars and Little Caesars from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Big+Caesars+and+Little+Caesars

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, December 11, 2023 1:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
For example, Trump and his supporters like to present the so-called Make America Great Again movement as an unstoppable force. This spin elides some inconvenient facts. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by nearly 3 million votes; he lost the 2020 popular vote by more than double that number.

This is why California keeps breaking our hearts when they promise that they will secede from the Union and they never follow through.

2016 Presidential General Votes by State:

California: 8,753,788 Clinton / 4,483,810 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 4,269,978

New York: 4,556,124 Clinton / 2,819,534 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 1,736,590

Illinois: 3,090,729 Clinton / 2,146,015 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 944,714

2020 Presidential General Votes by State:

California: 11,110,250 Biden / 6,006,429 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 5,103,821

New York: 5,244,886 Biden / 3,251,997 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 1,992,889

Illinois: 3,471,915 Biden / 2,446,891 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 1,025,024

TOTAL 2016 VOTES: 65,853,625 Clinton / 62,985,106 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 2,868,519

TOTAL 2020 VOTES: 81,284,666 Biden / 74,224,319 Trump / Surplus Democrat Votes: 7,060,347

In 2016 if California was not part of the Union, Trump won the popular vote among all 49 other states combined by 1,401,459.

In 2020 if California was not part of the Union, Trump only lost the popular vote among all 49 other states combined by 1,956,526. Remove New York too, and Trump won the popular vote among all 48 other states combined by 36,363.

Neither of these examples even need to remove Illinois from the popular vote totals for Trump to win.

This is why the Electoral College exists. So California and New York don't end up making policy for the entire fucking rest of the country that doesn't agree at all with how California and New York run things.

--------------------------------------------------

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Sunday, December 17, 2023 10:51 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why are Americans getting shorter?

By Andrew Van Dam | December 15, 2023

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/15/why-are-americans-g
etting-shorter/

Elementary school children in the 1950s often received full meals, cooked that day, sometimes as part of a government-funded program. (Camerique/Getty Images)

You already know we’re getting heavier. Rising obesity rates are as American as apple pie — a cliché that seems freshly relevant in this context. But did you know we’re also getting shorter?

We didn’t! At least, not until we tried to use the National Health Interview Survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to figure out which professions boast the tallest workers.

We split the rankings by gender, so our analysis didn’t simply lead us to the most male-dominated jobs, such as mechanics and engineers. Among women, the tallest are public officials — a category that includes top executives as well as legislators — and a broad category that includes writers, artists, entertainers and athletes. Among men, the tallest are, again, public officials, who share that distinction with sales representatives.

This made us wonder: Heights are self-reported in this survey, and the tallest professions are known for their spin skills. So, could the great American height slump somehow be fueled by Americans growing more honest about their stature?

Well, no. We saw similar results in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a separate, gold-standard CDC data set that deputizes trained personnel to measure people’s height, weight and other dimensions according to a 91-page-manual. If anything, that source shows an even sharper decline in America’s height — though we’re still talking about fractions of an inch. Height shifts slowly, especially at the national level.

Similarly, a truly immense analysis of expert measurements in 200 countries and territories found that height had slipped among 19-year-old Americans in the late 1990s and 2000s. Nineteen-year-old American men were the 36th-tallest globally in 1985, but by 2019, they were 47th. Women the same age fell from 38th to 58th, behind China and Lebanon.

Also, we’re not as bad at guessing our measurements as you might think. In a 2020 analysis, American Cancer Society researchers asked more than 2,600 Americans to state their height and weight, and then — without warning — weighed and measured them. Their findings show that a large majority of us know our height within two inches, and our weight within 10-plus pounds. (Though we all tend to err on the svelte side.)

If anything, self-reported heights underestimate our national shortening, according to a separate U.S. comparison of self-reported and expert-measured heights. “Data showed that overreporting of height increased over time in both men and women,” the report’s authors write, “while underreporting of weight increased in men but not women.”

And there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation why public officials and sales representatives are so tall: bias. We prefer towering politicians — we last picked a president of below-average height for his era, William McKinley, in 1896 — and studies of people such as hiring managers often find that they believe a taller salesman, for example, will impress customers.

The most diminutive occupations hold another clue. The shortest men work on farms, while the shortest women clean. Both professions hire the highest share of immigrant workers for their respective genders. And Americans who were born outside the country tend to be much shorter than folks who were born here — it’s one of the biggest height gaps we saw.

The immigrant share of the U.S. workforce has almost doubled since 1994, from 11 percent to 20 percent, according to our analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Could immigration explain American shrinkage?

It’s certainly a major factor. But it’s not the only one. Even among native-born Americans, heights have slipped. That inspired us to look at the other subtle-but-seismic shift in the American workforce: aging.

As we hit our 50s, both men and women start getting shorter. And the share of American workers 55 or older has nigh on doubled since 1994, from 12 percent to 23 percent. But again, young, native-born workers also show a drop in height — although it falls short of the drop among the entire population.

At a loss, we called in the big guns. Longtime University of Munich economics professor John Komlos helped pioneer the study of height as a socioeconomic indicator as a student at the University of Chicago under Robert Fogel, eventual winner of the Nobel Prize in economics.

The Hungary-born, Midwest-raised Komlos spent much of his adult life buried deep in the archives, assembling centuries of human-height data using everything from colonial-era newspaper reports of the physical stature of runaway indentured servants and enslaved people to Austro-Hungarian military records. Read this 2004 New Yorker epic for the data-collection details!

We dragged Komlos out of a happy retirement in central North Carolina (which he claims to spend reading Washington Post data columns) and asked him what the unholy heck was going on.

First, he assured us our data weren’t playing tricks. We’re shrinking. Vertically, at least. As a people, Americans were the tallest in the world by the 1800s, propelled by abundant land and cheap food. But today, access to modern medicine does more to determine height than do natural resources.

To pinpoint when everything changed, Komlos suggested that we focus on charting native-born people in prime ages (20 to 49) by birth year. Genetics play a supporting role, but the world you were born into really determines your height.

Following this method, the turning point becomes immediately and painfully clear: Around 1980, even native-born White men and women started getting shorter. (We’re looking specifically at Whites because they have the most robust data.)

And what term do we use for people born after 1980? Millennials! Incredibly, that generation is ground zero for American’s shrinking problem. Here at the Department of Data, we’ve developed an expertise in the ways millennials stand out in U.S. data, and it nonetheless took a world-famous authority to help us notice this one!

What changed in 1980? Childhood obesity began its steady rise, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. And Komlos believes America’s weight problem may be causing its height problem.

Evidence is mixed, but doctors analyzing almost 130,000 kids in California recently found that “childhood obesity is associated with earlier puberty in both boys and girls,” and Komlos and others have found that those children then experience a smaller growth spurt than their peers.

Louise Greenspan, a Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center pediatric endocrinologist who co-wrote “The New Puberty,” explained that obesity can cause early puberty because fat tissue pushes up estrogen levels for both girls and boys.

“Higher estrogen levels can lead to more mature bones. So your bones grow taller, faster, but then their growth plates fuse earlier,” Greenspan said. And if kids’ bones stop growing sooner, it’s possible they end up shorter. Greenspan said this is particularly true of young girls, which could help explain why we see heights dropping faster among millennial women.

But obesity might take a back seat to nutrition in making us shorter, Greenspan said. Changes in school lunches — “Now if kids are lucky enough to get a lunch at school, it is processed stuff that will last a full year if it stays on the shelf” — and larger societal factors shifted under infant millennials’ feet. After all, Komlos reminds us, the millennial generation wasn’t the only thing that began in 1981.

“The beginning of the Reagan administration is a watershed moment in the economic history of the U.S.,” he told us, pointing to his book, “Foundations of Real-World Economics.” “It was the end of the New Deal philosophy and a turn toward the idea that the market can deliver a good life.”

By driving down inequality, the New Deal and the Great Society literally lifted up the most vulnerable (and often shortest) Americans.

When all-star economists Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond (University of California at Berkeley, Northwestern University and Columbia University, respectively) ran the numbers on the rollout of food stamps in the United States from 1961 to 1975, they found that newfound access to food assistance in utero or early childhood caused a significant drop in stunting, or the odds of someone falling into the bottom 5 percent of heights as an adult.

With the Reagan-era pivot to market-based solutions, health-care costs soared. In the space of a decade, the United States went from spending 1.7 times as much as a typical advanced nation on health care to spending 2.1 times as much — a level near which it remains to this day.

As America’s health-care costs were rising, millennials were in their crucial early growth stages. Not coincidentally, Komlos has found that this is also when U.S. life expectancies began to falter.

“The U.S. fell behind European countries because Europe adopted a welfare state approach, which meant cheap medicine for the individual,” he said. The cheaper care and public support in Europe means “even poor people can afford to take their children to the doctor when they need to.”

But Komlos says there’s an even deeper issue than health care: rising inequality. Exact estimates vary, but sources tend to agree that 1970s were one of the most equitable eras in American history. Then, around 1981, inequality began to rise.

What does inequality have to do with height? Komlos explains that we lose more height to poverty that we gain from extreme wealth. If you make $200,000 a year, an extra $1,000 won’t make much difference in your household budget. But if you make $15,000 a year, losing $1,000 will take a substantial bite out of how well you can care for your kids. So, increasing inequality will push our average height ever lower even if average incomes and economic growth remain steady.

We see this result when, at Komlos’s suggestion, we split our height chart by education level.

People with a bachelor’s degree or higher have lost little, if any, height. The loss among those who never attended college has been much sharper, especially among women. (Again, this is for Whites, the group for which we have the best data.)

We’re guessing education doesn’t prevent shrinking. Instead, Komlos urges us to think about height the way we think about inheritance, as a visible sign of deeper advantages. If you’re given the resources you need to reach your full potential height, you’re also getting the resources you need to succeed in school and beyond.

For the rest of their lives, shorter millennials will bear the physical stamp of the inequality that erupted in their infancy. When we’re trying to explain America’s unluckiest generation, we should consider not just what they’ve become, but how they started out.

Hi! Your curiosity fuels the Department of Data. How much does the average person grow (or shrink) each year of their life? What are the country’s biggest public transit systems, and where do they rank globally? Are any communities still building starter homes? Just ask!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, December 17, 2023 11:07 AM

I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Sunday, December 17, 2023 12:14 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.

You're short, unemployed, toothless, and a diabetic with an insulin pump. I can see your dating future will be worse than now, especially if Trump loses, and that causes you to buy a gun to kill Democrats. Women tend to avoid lazy, poor, and angry white trash men with guns, especially the ones with strong opinions opposing abortion and women's rights.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, December 17, 2023 1:40 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I guess women are going to have to stop swiping left on guys under 5' 10" if they want a hookup in the future.
You're short, unemployed, toothless, and a diabetic with an insulin pump. I can see your dating future will be worse than now, especially if Trump loses, and that causes you to buy a gun to kill Democrats. Women tend to avoid lazy, poor, and angry white trash men with guns, especially the ones with strong opinions opposing abortion and women's rights.

Yeah. I'm diabetic, retired and average size. I'm also great looking with an athletic build, extremely skilled and without a want in the world.

I have no desire to date, brother. Have I ever once even said anything that would give you the slightest hint that I'd even be interested in dating since you've known me? The lowest common denominator in all of my failed relationships is me. After the Honeymoon period in a relationship is over and a relationship becomes actual work, I always lose interest and break somebody's heart. I'm better off alone and man enough to admit it. Quite a few people, male and female, are built that way, so you're not going to shame me on this issue.

I already have a gun. As long as there aren't any Democrats breaking into my house to steal something, they're not going to get shot by me.

I'm not poor or lazy. I've got plenty of money and everything is paid for. I get a lot of work done around my house, and I know how to fix pretty much anything whether it's house or car related. Most 20 year old men don't even know how to change the oil in their car or change a tire.

On abortion, my belief is that Republicans should just STFU and let the Democrats have it. If there is a God and he doesn't approve, they'll be dealt with after they die. If not, no harm no foul.

I'm fine with woman's rights too, so long as we're talking about equal rights. Feminists are not for equality. They're for superiority. I'm an egalitarian.

And, by the by... If you were diagnosed diabetic tomorrow you would kill yourself by the end of the year because you're a soy-infused pussy.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, December 30, 2023 7:39 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What became of politics in the Long 2010s.

By Mark Dunbar | Dec 20, 2023

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/presentation-and-pow
er

Reviewed Here

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
By Vincent Bevins
New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.

The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession
By Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger
New York: Verso Books, 2023.

Download the books for free from the mirrors at
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Vincent+Bevins
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Borriello+Jager

I “joined” the Occupy movement in my junior year of college. It was my first taste of political activism. Since turning eighteen and having my first real job (security guard), I'd been vaguely socialist. Before then I’d been vaguely right-wing. I was nervous during the first meeting. I didn’t look the part — six-four, athletic-ish, Nike shorts and Under Armour hoodie — and, worse, I knew I didn’t. I didn’t know the lingo. I didn’t know the etiquette. I didn’t know anything. I just knew I didn't like following orders from people who weren’t accountable to me.

The meeting was packed. It was conducted (we wouldn’t want to say “led,” would we?) by a guy who looked the part — short, skinny, long hair. The first red flag was when we were advised (not told, of course) to use spirit fingers rather than clap. The second red flag was when we voted to divide between town and campus groups — the town group would focus on housing, the campus group on student debt. In the campus group, all the ideas for what we should do were theatrical — hold up a banner during a football game, project student debt numbers on the side of a bank. That didn’t interest me. I was there for power, not presentation. But I stuck around for numerical strength, until, one night, after police removed us from occupying the political science building, a fellow Occupier accused me of being an undercover cop. In her defense, I did look that part.

This was during the Long 2010s (2009-2022), a decade during which there occurred more mass protests than any decade in history. The protests were against the usual suspects: capitalism, racism, imperialism, greed, corruption. Two new books, Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution and The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, are about these protests and why they seemed to summon more of what they protested against — more greed, more racism, more corruption. They take different approaches. The Populist Moment is an academic investigation into the electoral failures of left-wing candidates in Europe and the United States (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Greece’s Syriza party), while If We Burn is a journalistic account of street protests in the Third World (Brazil, Indonesia, Chile) as well as Turkey and Ukraine.

While the electoral and protest approaches are different, they yielded the same result. The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies. Protestors couldn’t make demands because they shunned the formal structures of decision-making that could have led to change; protest candidates couldn’t advance concrete policies because they had no confidence those policies would be electorally sustainable. In other words, where there was a will there was no way, and where there was a way there was no will. Still, the shell of failure can contain kernels of success. Bernie Sanders, for example, didn’t become president — he wasn't the Democratic nominee — but he was a viable candidate. And the skill and knowledge acquired during that time (campaign discipline, policy formation, ideological communication) did not disappear overnight. We see these qualities now in the ambition and vibrancy of the labor movement, which has recently won big victories in the film and auto industries, among other places.

Of course, failure can be character-defining. And political failure can define one’s political character, leading to despair or conversion — in many cases, either to establishment hack or useful idiot for fascism. A lot of dixie-whistling has been done about the latter conversion path (proof of the so-called “horseshoe” theory of politics), but such conversions say less about political ideologies than individual personalities. A politics of hope will attract the hopeless, but hope defeated can push the hopeless into despair. And there will be plenty of despair merchants down there waiting for them. Likewise, those who want to wave a banner that the angry can rally around (and it was Augustine who said anger was the beautiful child of hope) will wave whatever banner is most attractive to the angry — whether it leads to better wages or to the burning of books. Finally, there are the careerists. Of course, some ideologies are more likely to attract careerists, just as others are more likely to attract sadists. But those who, after the failure of the Long 2010s, drifted into nihilistic cynicism or started playing footsie with fascism (or, more likely, both) didn’t undergo a political conversion; they succumbed to cowardice. Courage being Augustine’s second beautiful child of hope.

Both If We Burn and The Populist Moment blame similar culprits. Borriello and Jäger blame the general atomization of society (the decline of participation in civic organizations, labor unions, and political parties). Jäger has written elsewhere about how we live in an age in which everything is political but there are few genuine political outlets, a strange set of circumstances that explains how, without genuine political outlets, our politics has become vague, and the vaguer the politics the greater the fear of those politics being transgressed. (Without firm political foundations or boundaries, every compromise can feel like a capitulation, every encroachment an invasion.) Bevins blames the ideological plague of “horizontalism” and “spontaneity” — the anarchic impulse for a structureless, leaderless movement. But, as Bevin points out, the decline of formal structures or formal leadership doesn’t entail an absence of structure and leadership. It creates conditions for informal structure and informal leadership.

In my own Occupy experience, even though we were technically structureless and leaderless, it was always the same people conducting the meetings, and they were also the first to oppose formalizing anything. I doubt this was done cynically. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t. I think they just wanted to attract as many people as possible and, to their minds, they felt a movement that required no obligations and made no particular demands on one’s conscience was the best way of doing that. All that was asked of participants was their presence and a vague desire for change. That should have been a third red flag because a vague desire for change invites quite a bit of nonsense. I remember one night walking from the general meeting to a more selective meeting for those of us willing to engage in direct action (in this case, preventing a Goldman Sachs banker from speaking on campus), when one of the other participants started talking to me about the evils of the Federal Reserve (the libertarian boogeyman) and how it was devaluing the dollar (not a bad thing for us debtors). What’s the old Marxist joke? The only thing worse than being exploited by capital is not being exploited by capital? If easy credit replacing wage growth was bad, wait until there was no wage growth and no easy credit.

Bevins sees the structureless, leaderless ethos as a product of the Sixties and the New Left. Authoritarian structures, so that generation tended to believe, couldn’t bring about democratic changes. A false dichotomy, to be sure. Never mind that “authoritarian structures” have, can, and hopefully will continue to bring about democratic changes. It doesn’t escape Bevins that this anarchic impulse was probably just a coping mechanism for the general atomization Barriello and Jäger write about. The structures were destroyed, good riddance anyway. Nor does the fact that this impulse mirrors the very society it was ostensibly protesting against. “At the end of the day,” retrospectively concluded one protestor Bevins interviewed, “horizontalism is a reflection of individualism.”

Both If We Burn and The Populist Moment are “This Is What’s Wrong” books rather than “This Is How To Fix It” books and, therefore, ironically, suffer a bit from the vague desire for change that they chagrin. Bevins, to his credit, ends his book lambasting the unseriousness of long-decade protestors — particularly white, Western ones — who, after failing, didn’t suffer the same fate as their Third World compatriots. (“There's no more agreeable position,” said Evelyn Waugh, “than that of dissident from a stable society.”) Western protestors found refuge in academia and the nonprofit world, while their compatriots were thrown in prison or murdered. And Bevins seems aware that that’s his situation as well. What print media outlet nowadays isn’t sustained by some largesse in one form or another? Nonetheless, the general thesis of both If We Burn and The Populist Moment is correct. What’s needed is courage and competency. Less obscure knowledge of French cinematic history, more concrete knowledge of QuickBooks and how a warehouse functions; fewer heads in the clouds, more feet on the ground. Otherwise one should admit not an interest in power but in presentation — that one’s vague desire for change is more a homely rebelliousness than a radical conviction.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 15, 2024 8:17 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

Biden's migrant crisis: Illegal border crossings have jumped 277% from Trump's term

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12930845/Biden-migrant-border
-statistics-Trump-immigration.html

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Monday, January 15, 2024 11:30 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What became of politics in the Long 2010s.

By Mark Dunbar | Dec 20, 2023

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/presentation-and-pow
er

Reviewed Here

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution
By Vincent Bevins
New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.

The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession
By Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger
New York: Verso Books, 2023.

Download the books for free from the mirrors at
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Vincent+Bevins
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Borriello+Jager

I “joined” the Occupy movement in my junior year of college. It was my first taste of political activism. Since turning eighteen and having my first real job (security guard), I'd been vaguely socialist. Before then I’d been vaguely right-wing. I was nervous during the first meeting. I didn’t look the part — six-four, athletic-ish, Nike shorts and Under Armour hoodie — and, worse, I knew I didn’t. I didn’t know the lingo. I didn’t know the etiquette. I didn’t know anything. I just knew I didn't like following orders from people who weren’t accountable to me.

The meeting was packed. It was conducted (we wouldn’t want to say “led,” would we?) by a guy who looked the part — short, skinny, long hair. The first red flag was when we were advised (not told, of course) to use spirit fingers rather than clap. The second red flag was when we voted to divide between town and campus groups — the town group would focus on housing, the campus group on student debt. In the campus group, all the ideas for what we should do were theatrical — hold up a banner during a football game, project student debt numbers on the side of a bank. That didn’t interest me. I was there for power, not presentation. But I stuck around for numerical strength, until, one night, after police removed us from occupying the political science building, a fellow Occupier accused me of being an undercover cop. In her defense, I did look that part.

This was during the Long 2010s (2009-2022), a decade during which there occurred more mass protests than any decade in history. The protests were against the usual suspects: capitalism, racism, imperialism, greed, corruption. Two new books, Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution and The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, are about these protests and why they seemed to summon more of what they protested against — more greed, more racism, more corruption. They take different approaches. The Populist Moment is an academic investigation into the electoral failures of left-wing candidates in Europe and the United States (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Greece’s Syriza party), while If We Burn is a journalistic account of street protests in the Third World (Brazil, Indonesia, Chile) as well as Turkey and Ukraine.

While the electoral and protest approaches are different, they yielded the same result. The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies. Protestors couldn’t make demands because they shunned the formal structures of decision-making that could have led to change; protest candidates couldn’t advance concrete policies because they had no confidence those policies would be electorally sustainable. In other words, where there was a will there was no way, and where there was a way there was no will. Still, the shell of failure can contain kernels of success. Bernie Sanders, for example, didn’t become president — he wasn't the Democratic nominee — but he was a viable candidate. And the skill and knowledge acquired during that time (campaign discipline, policy formation, ideological communication) did not disappear overnight. We see these qualities now in the ambition and vibrancy of the labor movement, which has recently won big victories in the film and auto industries, among other places.

Of course, failure can be character-defining. And political failure can define one’s political character, leading to despair or conversion — in many cases, either to establishment hack or useful idiot for fascism. A lot of dixie-whistling has been done about the latter conversion path (proof of the so-called “horseshoe” theory of politics), but such conversions say less about political ideologies than individual personalities. A politics of hope will attract the hopeless, but hope defeated can push the hopeless into despair. And there will be plenty of despair merchants down there waiting for them. Likewise, those who want to wave a banner that the angry can rally around (and it was Augustine who said anger was the beautiful child of hope) will wave whatever banner is most attractive to the angry — whether it leads to better wages or to the burning of books. Finally, there are the careerists. Of course, some ideologies are more likely to attract careerists, just as others are more likely to attract sadists. But those who, after the failure of the Long 2010s, drifted into nihilistic cynicism or started playing footsie with fascism (or, more likely, both) didn’t undergo a political conversion; they succumbed to cowardice. Courage being Augustine’s second beautiful child of hope.

Both If We Burn and The Populist Moment blame similar culprits. Borriello and Jäger blame the general atomization of society (the decline of participation in civic organizations, labor unions, and political parties). Jäger has written elsewhere about how we live in an age in which everything is political but there are few genuine political outlets, a strange set of circumstances that explains how, without genuine political outlets, our politics has become vague, and the vaguer the politics the greater the fear of those politics being transgressed. (Without firm political foundations or boundaries, every compromise can feel like a capitulation, every encroachment an invasion.) Bevins blames the ideological plague of “horizontalism” and “spontaneity” — the anarchic impulse for a structureless, leaderless movement. But, as Bevin points out, the decline of formal structures or formal leadership doesn’t entail an absence of structure and leadership. It creates conditions for informal structure and informal leadership.

In my own Occupy experience, even though we were technically structureless and leaderless, it was always the same people conducting the meetings, and they were also the first to oppose formalizing anything. I doubt this was done cynically. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t. I think they just wanted to attract as many people as possible and, to their minds, they felt a movement that required no obligations and made no particular demands on one’s conscience was the best way of doing that. All that was asked of participants was their presence and a vague desire for change. That should have been a third red flag because a vague desire for change invites quite a bit of nonsense. I remember one night walking from the general meeting to a more selective meeting for those of us willing to engage in direct action (in this case, preventing a Goldman Sachs banker from speaking on campus), when one of the other participants started talking to me about the evils of the Federal Reserve (the libertarian boogeyman) and how it was devaluing the dollar (not a bad thing for us debtors). What’s the old Marxist joke? The only thing worse than being exploited by capital is not being exploited by capital? If easy credit replacing wage growth was bad, wait until there was no wage growth and no easy credit.

Bevins sees the structureless, leaderless ethos as a product of the Sixties and the New Left. Authoritarian structures, so that generation tended to believe, couldn’t bring about democratic changes. A false dichotomy, to be sure. Never mind that “authoritarian structures” have, can, and hopefully will continue to bring about democratic changes. It doesn’t escape Bevins that this anarchic impulse was probably just a coping mechanism for the general atomization Barriello and Jäger write about. The structures were destroyed, good riddance anyway. Nor does the fact that this impulse mirrors the very society it was ostensibly protesting against. “At the end of the day,” retrospectively concluded one protestor Bevins interviewed, “horizontalism is a reflection of individualism.”

Both If We Burn and The Populist Moment are “This Is What’s Wrong” books rather than “This Is How To Fix It” books and, therefore, ironically, suffer a bit from the vague desire for change that they chagrin. Bevins, to his credit, ends his book lambasting the unseriousness of long-decade protestors — particularly white, Western ones — who, after failing, didn’t suffer the same fate as their Third World compatriots. (“There's no more agreeable position,” said Evelyn Waugh, “than that of dissident from a stable society.”) Western protestors found refuge in academia and the nonprofit world, while their compatriots were thrown in prison or murdered. And Bevins seems aware that that’s his situation as well. What print media outlet nowadays isn’t sustained by some largesse in one form or another? Nonetheless, the general thesis of both If We Burn and The Populist Moment is correct. What’s needed is courage and competency. Less obscure knowledge of French cinematic history, more concrete knowledge of QuickBooks and how a warehouse functions; fewer heads in the clouds, more feet on the ground. Otherwise one should admit not an interest in power but in presentation — that one’s vague desire for change is more a homely rebelliousness than a radical conviction.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

And I'm absolutely certain that you didn't grasp Mark's message here.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, January 23, 2024 11:32 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Raw data: Social welfare spending

By Kevin Drum / Jan 23, 2024

https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-social-welfare-spending/

The top chart shows total federal social welfare spending (adjusted for inflation) since 1960. The bottom chart breaks out the categories for 2023 so you can see exactly what I'm including.

The trendline in the top chart is for 1960-2019, extended through 2023. Social welfare spending surged during the pandemic for obvious reasons, and is now back on its pre-pandemic trend.

NOTE: All data comes from OMB Table 11.3 except for recent SNAP figures, which come from the USDA. All figures are adjusted for inflation using the PCE index.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/
https://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-
snap

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 27, 2024 5:29 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Kamala Harris is an idiot.

Everybody knows that she is an idiot.

Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Having a niwit VP is a President's term insurance. Can you imagine how fast Biden* would have been out of office if Camel-like Harris was even halfway competent?

SIGNYM

tick tock

T

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Saturday, January 27, 2024 5:48 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Kamala Harris is an idiot.

Everybody knows that she is an idiot.

Democrats are just praying that Biden* doesn't die before the election.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Having a niwit VP is a President's term insurance. Can you imagine how fast Biden* would have been out of office if Camel-like Harris was even halfway competent?

SIGNYM

tick tock

T

What's that tick tock for?

Are you counting down the days to Kamala Harris being President now?

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:27 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

How the American Right Fell in Love With Dictators, Over and Over Again

Trump and Putin are nothing new.

By Casey Michel | March 10, 2024

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/not-just-putin-why-the-right-f
alls-in-love-with-dictators.html

For years, an imperialistic, hard-right European dictator unleashing bloodshed across the Continent cultivated supporters across the U.S. This despot claimed he was leading a “unique, anti-Western culture,” and, in so doing, cultivated allies and fellow travelers among conservatives across America, all of whom were disgusted by “corrupt Western liberal values” and who “scorned Western liberalism as a bankrupt ideology.” Nor was this appeal just rhetorical; as investigators later discovered, this right-wing revanchist bankrolled both propaganda efforts and agents on the ground, successfully turning Americans, especially on the right, to his cause.

To modern readers, the story is a familiar one — not least as it pertains to Donald Trump’s affections for Vladimir Putin, to say nothing of how Russian forces have cultivated conservative Americans from Tucker Carlson to the National Rifle Association and beyond. But the aforementioned case has nothing to do with Putin or with Trump. Instead, it took place a century ago, when conservatives across the U.S. flocked to the cause of Germany’s militarist tyrant, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In so doing, as Jacob Heilbrunn successfully argues in his new book, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators, they created a blueprint for how foreign dictators even decades later could cultivate conservative communities to their cause — and could, by the early 21st century, help propel one as far as the presidency. The story of the Americans who worshipped Wilhelm is just one of a range of pro-dictatorship efforts that Heilbrunn excavates, threading a century-long conservative infatuation with right-wing dictators. It’s not only a corrective to the voluminous (if also accurate) investigations on how communist tyrannies fostered leftist supporters in the U.S., but also an able — and wildly timely — effort to stitch together nominally disparate views, from different epochs and eras. It all adds up to a convincing conclusion: that Trump, in “lavishing praise on Putin and other dictators … wasn’t creating a new style of right-wing politics,” Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest and author of a previously acclaimed book on the history of neoconservatives, writes. “Instead, he was building on a long-standing tradition.”

It’s a tradition that has seen surprisingly little scrutiny, allowing Trump’s treacly fealty to Putin to seem like an aberration. To be sure, there are elements unique to Trump’s personal predilections — not least his history as a luxury real-estate developer, an industry that profited arguably more than any other from the illicit, kleptocratic flows linked to foreign dictators, laundering untold millions of dollars (and potentially more) in the process. Never before could foreign despots so easily, and so effectively, patronize the company of a sitting American president.

But in other far more conspicuous ways, Trump is simply building on a legacy long predating his rise. There were, for instance, the early devotions to the Ur-Fascist himself, Benito Mussolini. Il Duce presented himself not only as a guarantor of order and stability — and a bastion against left-wing forces in Italy and beyond — but as someone who posed “as a defender of whites,” Heilbrunn notes, who prioritized “family values” and who, “in stark contrast to hedonistic America, cherished manliness.” (He also cherished Wall Street with JP Morgan organizing a loan for the Fascist government worth nearly $2 billion in modern currency.) Conservatives in America lapped it up, fêting not only Mussolini but salivating for a similar leader in the U.S. One conservative writer, Irving Babbitt, bleated that circumstances “may arrive when we may esteem ourselves fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may be needed to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin.”

So, too, did plenty of conservative Americans view the rise of Mussolini’s younger brother, ideologically, in Berlin. While the organization of pro-Nazi sympathizers in America has seen more detailed treatments elsewhere, Heilbrunn ropes in other conservatives who freely platformed Adolf Hitler. Germany’s dictator was freely supported by conservatives such as William Randolph Hearst, who “not only admired the Fuhrer, but commissioned him and Mussolini to write for his newspapers for handsome fees.” Later investigations revealed that Hitler’s regime picked up on the kaiser’s previous model, not only covertly funding agents in the U.S. but even slipping pro-Nazi propaganda into official congressional mailings, recruiting some of the U.S.’s most conservative representatives of the time.

The postwar smothering of fascism didn’t seem to slow conservatives’ lust for right-wing strongmen. By the 1960s, the primary home for such reverence was found not necessarily in Washington but in the pages of National Review, where founder William F. Buckley and his claque of writers apparently never found a hard-right despot they couldn’t support. There was Spain’s Francisco Franco, whom Buckley dubbed an “authentic national hero,” Heilbrunn writes. There was Portugal’s Antonio Salazar, who wrote in the magazine that he was “fighting for Western civilization and Christian values.” There was Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, whom Buckley viewed as a “bona fide leader who knew how to exercise power.” (After Pinochet used a car bomb to assassinate a political opponent in Washington, D.C., Chilean officials turned directly to Buckley for advice on how to “sanitize Pinochet’s reputation,” for which Buckley happily obliged.)

Soon, though, such sentiments swelled back into the White House. By the Reagan era, American affections for right-wing despots during the late Cold War blossomed into official policy. The architect for such fondness was Reagan’s foreign-policy adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as an “unabashed defender” of right-wing regimes throughout her tenure. Nor was she picky about the form. Militarists in Argentina, those running death squads in El Salvador, the authors of apartheid in South Africa: Kirkpatrick, with Reagan in tow, succored them all.

But then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and a few years later, the Soviet Union shattered. America — and liberalism — stood triumphant. Supporting such regimes was suddenly gauche, out of step with this American moment. And the patterns and preferences that propped up American backing of right-wing dictators slunk back into the shadows.

But it never disappeared entirely. As with so much of the paleoconservative architecture of Trumpism — the nativism and the racism, the suspicion of the federal government and the amorality undergirding it all — Heilbrunn identified Pat Buchanan as the figure who kept the flames of such fawning for right-wing dictators alive. Not only did Buchanan refer to leaders like Hitler as “an individual of great courage,” but Buchanan whipped up opposition to American intervention in the Balkans, calling time and again to let Serbian tyrant Slobodan Milosevic have his way and commit genocide.

As Heilbrunn writes, Buchanan — who would later turn his affections toward figures like Putin, even before Trump entered the White House — “longed for a kind of internationalism rooted in those small towns and conservative values and in whiteness, whether in the U.S. or in Serbia or Russia or South Africa or elsewhere.” For years, Buchanan “seemed like a Cassandra,” but as Heilbrunn added, “One prospective candidate for the presidency who picked up on … Buchanan’s unusual history lessons was a loudmouthed Manhattan real estate mogul” — a figure who gave Buchanan’s views the biggest platform yet, carving an entire political movement out of a conservative tradition few Americans had any idea existed.

Thanks to Heilbrunn’s book, however, that confusion is no more. And while the book’s actual writing verges on the overwrought — words like oneiric and pursuivant belong in spelling bees, not mainstream political analysis — Heilbrunn correctly identifies the core of this conservative strain. Trumpists, and those who came before, “are advocating ethno-nationalism in the guise of a set of principles.” Just as the white supremacist Redeemers before them claimed they were simply advocating a restoration of democracy, so, too, do the Herrenvolk reactionaries of the MAGA world claim they’re simply restoring supposed American greatness — and that right-wing despots abroad should be allies in the fight.

If there’s a fault in Heilbrunn’s writing, it’s that there might be too much emphasis on such ideological affinity. After all, dictatorships’ abilities to inflame and inflate American conservative support can’t operate without a latticework of supporters. And as we’ve learned in recent years, those operatives — the lobbyists and the PR specialists, the law firms and the consultancies, the former congressional officials who leave office and immediately transform into mouthpieces for foreign regimes — don’t require any ideological overlap with their despotic clients. All they need is to get paid, and they’ll be happy to transform into foot-soldiers for tyranny.

Just look, for instance, at the network that serviced Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian thug who ruled Ukraine until Kyiv’s democratic revolution a decade ago. There was Paul Manafort, who later became Trump’s 2016 campaign manager. But there was also Tony Podesta, who until the mid-2010s oversaw arguably the leading Democratic lobbying shop in Washington. There was even Tad Devine, who helped Yanukovych grab power in 2010 — and who then steered Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. It was an ideological potpourri, all working at the behest of an autocrat who tried to cement pro-Russian rule in Kyiv — and whose ouster lit a fuse that detonated stability in Europe and that now risks far more devastation.

But that’s all the subject for another book (mine, called Foreign Agents, will be hitting bookshelves in August). In the meantime, Heilbrunn’s analysis of this glorification of right-wing dictatorships is a warning — as if more were needed — of what a potential Trump second term could look like. Whether it’s Putin’s Russia or Orbán’s Hungary, or even the echoes of Wilhelmine Germany, the conclusion is clear: “Aggrieved … by what they perceived as their own society’s failings — its liberalism, its tolerance, its increasing secularism — conservatives have searched for a paradise abroad that can serve as a model of home.” The kaiser would be proud.

Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:43 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

Oh... get fucked dude. Hitler was a Democrat. He was one of yours.

Joe Biden* and his administration are currently doing every single thing you're suggesting that Trump is going to do when re-elected, which are also things Trump didn't do when he was President the first time.

The terminally braindead among us vote Democrat because they're so easy to manipulate by leftist shit rags like New York Magazine.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 12:28 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

Oh... get fucked dude. Hitler was a Democrat. He was one of yours.

Joe Biden* and his administration are currently doing every single thing you're suggesting that Trump is going to do when re-elected, which are also things Trump didn't do when he was President the first time.

The terminally braindead among us vote Democrat because they're so easy to manipulate by leftist shit rags like New York Magazine.

This was from yesterday, 6ix:

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
#Rootin4Putin

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=64887&mid=11894
51#1189451

6ix, it was only a few weeks ago I told you about Joe Duncan, a pilot for Eastern Airlines back in 1962. He made the same kind of arguments you do. Predictably, he dropped dead early in life, in 1965 from choking on a chicken bone. Joe was a fat, greedy, loudmouth asshole, the same as Trump or the average angry poor white trash Trumptard.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 9:38 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

Oh... get fucked dude. Hitler was a Democrat. He was one of yours.

Joe Biden* and his administration are currently doing every single thing you're suggesting that Trump is going to do when re-elected, which are also things Trump didn't do when he was President the first time.

The terminally braindead among us vote Democrat because they're so easy to manipulate by leftist shit rags like New York Magazine.
This was from yesterday, 6ix:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
#Rootin4Putin
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=64887&mid=11894
51#1189451

Yup. That was me.

Quote:
6ix, it was only a few weeks ago I told you about Joe Duncan

Oh, did you? I ignore most of what you post.

Quote:
, a pilot for Eastern Airlines back in 1962. He made the same kind of arguments you do. Predictably, he dropped dead early in life, in 1965 from choking on a chicken bone. Joe was a fat, greedy, loudmouth asshole, the same as Trump or the average angry poor white trash Trumptard.

I'm fucking awesome dude. Have fun at work tomorrow, bitch.

You ain't never going to retire.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024 6:11 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Not Just Putin: Why the Right Falls in Love with Dictators

How the American Right Fell in Love With Dictators, Over and Over Again

Trump and Putin are nothing new.

By Casey Michel | March 10, 2024

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/not-just-putin-why-the-right-f
alls-in-love-with-dictators.html

House Republican giggles over Hitler praise — and admits he never listens to Trump

By Kathleen Culliton, Matt Laslo | March 12, 2024

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-hitler-2667497580/

WASHINGTON — A Republican House representative burst into laughter Tuesday when a Raw Story reporter asked him to comment on former President Donald Trump's remarks praising autocrats that included Adolf Hitler.

"You guys still paying attention to what Trump says?" Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) said with a giggle. "Oh my God ... journalists never learn."

Harris, a Freedom Caucus member whose ties to Trump include attendance at a meeting in 2020 to discuss keeping the former president in the White House, admitted that he does not listen to the words that come out of the leading Republican presidential candidate's mouth.

"You guys don't listen to Trump?" Raw Story asked.

"No, of course not!" Harris said. "You look at what he does, not what he says."

Harris' assertion comes as the release of a new book — "The Return of Great Powers" by CNN's Jim Sciutto — details warnings from former Trump advisers over their onetime boss' admiration for autocrats.
https://www.amazon.com/Return-Great-Powers-Russia-China-ebook/dp/B0CDF
TP82H/
https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Jim+Sciutto

“He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser under Trump, told Sciutto. "He kind of likes that.”

Retired Marines General John Kelly told Sciutto he convinced Trump to stop praising the Nazi leader who masterminded the Holocaust by arguing Italian's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was "a great guy in comparison.”

"Hitler did some good things," Trump said, according to Kelly. "[Hitler] rebuilt the economy."

This prompted Kelly to note what Hitler did with that thriving economy: "He turned it against his own people and against the world.

"I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.'"

News of this exchange came as a surprise to Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), who told Raw Story he "didn't know anything about" Trump's professed admiration for strong men leaders and added, "That's crazy."

Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA) came to Trump's defense, telling Raw Story he believed Trump's praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin was simply respect for an intelligent adversary.

"Somebody could be dastardly ... but they could still be smart," Meuser said. But he added, "I'm not going to get into Hitler."

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) echoed Meuser's adversary argument and accused Kelly of stirring up a fuss because he did not have a war to fight.

"All these old generals, retire, go home, enough is enough," Nehls said. "Oh come on. Praising Hitler? They take that all out of context."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024 6:44 AM

That post is a self own.

You're an idiot.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024 8:08 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That post is a self own.

You're an idiot.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

Trump praise for Hitler ‘disgraceful but wholly unsurprising’
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4526186-biden-campaign-trump-pra
ise-for-hitler-disgraceful-but-wholly-unsurprising/

Aide tried to stop Trump praising Hitler – by telling him Mussolini was ‘great guy’
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/12/mussolini-trump-hitler-j
ohn-kelly-jim-sciutto-book

Former advisers sound the alarm that Trump praises despots in private and on the campaign trail
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/11/politics/trump-despots-advisers-sound-a
larm/index.html

Trump Apparently Has a List of Things He Loves About Adolf Hitler
https://newrepublic.com/post/179741/trump-praise-adolf-hitler-john-kel
ly

Donald Trump says he is 'not a student of Hitler'
"I know nothing about Hitler," former President Donald Trump said.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-student-hitler-rule-dicta
tor/story?id=105875771

Trump admires Hitler, is infatuated with Putin
https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-admires-hitler-is-infatuated-with-
putin-former-staff-claim-in-new-book/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 7:19 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How the US is destroying young people's future

In a scorching talk, marketing professor and podcaster Scott Galloway dissects the data showing that, by many measures, young people in the US are worse off financially than ever before. He unpacks the root causes and effects of this "great intergenerational theft," asking why we let it continue and showing how we could make it end.

Read The Transcript
https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destroying_youn
g_people_s_future/transcript

Some excerpts:

Quote:
A decent proxy for how much we value youth labor is minimum wage, and we've kept it purposely pretty low. If it had just kept pace with productivity, it'd be at about 23 bucks a share. But we've decided to purposely keep it low.

Out of reach.
Median home price has skyrocketed relative to median household income. As a result, pre-pandemic, the average mortgage payment was 1,100 dollars, it's now 2,300 dollars because of an acceleration in interest rates and the fact that the average home has gone from 290,000 to 420.

The third rail.
I'm going to talk about Social Security. It would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill. But the additional 135 billion dollars a year to Social Security, that flies right through Congress. And every year we transfer 1.4 trillion dollars from a cohort that is increasingly doing less well to the cohort that is the wealthiest cohort in the history of this planet. I'm not against Social Security, but the criteria should be if you need it, not whether you have a catheter.

What can we do?
Nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed with what's right with it. We got the hard stuff figured out. There are programs to address all of these issues, they cost a lot of money, that's the hard part. And we have figured this out. In just five minutes post an earnings call, we can add a quarter of a trillion dollars to the economy. We've got the hard part figured out, the resources.

We have the money, but we decide not to do it.
This is per-capita spending on child care in the United States relative to other nations. This is housing permits. Things are doable. We increase minimum wage at 25 bucks an hour, it goes into the economy. The wonderful things about low- and middle-income households is they spend all their money. We have to have or restore or a progressive tax structure with alternative minimum tax on corporations and wealthy individuals. We need to refund the IRS. We need to reform Social Security. It should be based on whether you need the money, not on how old you are. We need a negative income tax. My friend Andrew Yang screwed up a great idea, but he branded it incorrectly. Instead of calling it UBI, he should’ve got Republicans on board by calling it a negative income tax.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 7:46 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

How the US is destroying young people's future

In a scorching talk, marketing professor and podcaster Scott Galloway dissects the data showing that, by many measures, young people in the US are worse off financially than ever before. He unpacks the root causes and effects of this "great intergenerational theft," asking why we let it continue and showing how we could make it end.

Read The Transcript
https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destroying_youn
g_people_s_future/transcript

The Greatest Reindustrialization Process in US History

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 7:51 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:

How the US is destroying young people's future

In a scorching talk, marketing professor and podcaster Scott Galloway dissects the data showing that, by many measures, young people in the US are worse off financially than ever before. He unpacks the root causes and effects of this "great intergenerational theft," asking why we let it continue and showing how we could make it end.

Read The Transcript
https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destroying_youn
g_people_s_future/transcript

America is set to
take off when it comes to very good
paying blue color jobs, from one end
of the country to the other. We are in
the best shape of any country on the planet.

T

The Greatest Reindustrialization Process in US History

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 11:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

America Is Captive to One Ridiculous Legal Theory That Dictates Our Lives

Originalism — the once obscure legal theory now embraced by the right-wing reactionaries on the Supreme Court — should never have taken over in the first place. The originalist ideology maintains that the meaning of the Constitution is fixed at the time of its enactment, and its provisions must be understood now as the public purportedly understood them back then. Yet the Supreme Court expressly rejected that very idea in May 1954 when it decided Brown v. Board of Education and recognized racially segregated schools as unconstitutional: “We cannot turn the clock back to 1868,” the court wrote with reference to the adoption of the 14th Amendment, “or even to 1896 when Plessy v. Ferguson was written.”

Crucially, the court’s finest moment was premised on the idea that binding legal interpretation to history is not the only way — or even a good way — to make decisions about the Constitution and the country. Brown provides a welcome reminder that originalism is the tool of segregationists and that the theory should be treated with disdain.

The idea that modern constitutional interpretation can’t deviate from its alleged original public meaning continues to serve the same function today as it did in 1954 when it was invoked by the litigants defending segregation. The reason why the Republican justices on the Supreme Court and their enablers claim that legitimate constitutional interpretation must follow some version of American history and tradition is so that they can drag the country back to the oppressive eras for which they’re nostalgic.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/throw-out-originalism-do-i
nclusive-constitutionalism.html

This article is inspired by the author’s work in her book The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 12:13 PM

*yawn*

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 12:52 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
*yawn*

Our parents' generation tried hard to give us a better life than they had. So why can’t this young generation do the same for us?
https://www.gocomics.com/fminus/2024/05/08

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 1:08 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
*yawn*
Our parents' generation tried hard to give us a better life than they had. So why can’t this young generation do the same for us?
https://www.gocomics.com/fminus/2024/05/08

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

This has nothing at all to do with Trump, but I agree.

Boomers are the last generation that is going to have a good share of the wealth and a cushy retirement. Gen X will get a few residual bread crumbs. Any Millennials old enough and smart enough to have bought a house between the housing market crash and the end of Trump's 1st term should probably be alright.

Everybody else is fucked, and their only hopes of ever owning a home is if they're left one in a will.

That's what eventually happens when everything from social programs to car insurance is built on a pyramid scheme.

The only way to save the future is for everybody to fuck and have 5 kids each, but unless they all have 5 kids each it's just going to be an even bigger problem for them when they're of age. And good luck raising all those kids in this economy. And that would just be kicking two cans further down the road because your children are by far your largest carbon footprint and overpopulation is a problem that nobody is willing to talk about now.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 2:51 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
*yawn*
Our parents' generation tried hard to give us a better life than they had. So why can’t this young generation do the same for us?
https://www.gocomics.com/fminus/2024/05/08

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

This has nothing at all to do with Trump, but I agree.

Boomers are the last generation that is going to have a good share of the wealth and a cushy retirement. Gen X will get a few residual bread crumbs. Any Millennials old enough and smart enough to have bought a house between the housing market crash and the end of Trump's 1st term should probably be alright.

Everybody else is fucked, and their only hopes of ever owning a home is if they're left one in a will.

That's what eventually happens when everything from social programs to car insurance is built on a pyramid scheme.

The only way to save the future is for everybody to fuck and have 5 kids each, but unless they all have 5 kids each it's just going to be an even bigger problem for them when they're of age. And good luck raising all those kids in this economy. And that would just be kicking two cans further down the road because your children are by far your largest carbon footprint and overpopulation is a problem that nobody is willing to talk about now.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

How about a negative income tax benefiting the poor -- such as children living in poverty and unemployable people like yourself? Old people would hate that negative income tax.

How about taxing capital gains at a higher rate than wages? Old people would hate that, too, but those receiving the negative income tax would love it.

How about the FICA tax being set to zero percent of wages while Social Security and Medicare are paid for by taxes on the capital gains of the wealthy? Old people would hate with a passion setting FICA to zero but it would be a wage boost for workers!

How about net-zero carbon emissions? It would create millions of good jobs and is possible but once again, old people would be opposed. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+get+a+zero+carbon+economy

All these things could be done, except all Republican Congressmen would be opposed.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 6:14 PM

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 8:49 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

If Trump gets reelected, taxes won't be collected to pay for improvements. In particular:

May 8, 2024

The cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts for households, small businesses and the estates of wealthy individuals enacted under President Donald Trump has expanded to $4.6 trillion, according to new estimates from Congress’s fiscal scorekeeper.

That puts a massive price tag on what is likely to be a top issue in Washington next year as lawmakers grapple with the future of Trump’s tax cuts, which are slated to expire at the end of 2025.

https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/extending-trump-
tax-cuts-would-add-46-trillion-to-the-deficit-cbo-finds

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, May 8, 2024 11:50 PM

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Thursday, May 9, 2024 12:25 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

Let me check if the following fact still freaks you out, 6ix:

Only Grover Cleveland was elected to non-consecutive terms as president. Six Presidents were shot. 6ix, are you still insisting that it is a death threat to mention the heuristic that Trump is six times more likely to be shot than be elected to non-consecutive terms? Since every Trumptard I know is certifiably insane, and has the difficult lives that follow from being crazy, I expect 6ix will freak out, once again.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123426/us-president-assassination
s-attempts/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 9, 2024 12:37 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
Let me check if the following fact still freaks you out, 6ix:

Only Grover Cleveland was elected to non-consecutive terms as president. Six Presidents were shot. 6ix, are you still insisting that it is a death threat to mention the heuristic that Trump is six times more likely to be shot than be elected to non-consecutive terms? Since every Trumptard I know is certifiably insane, and has the difficult lives that follow from being crazy, I expect 6ix will freak out, once again.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123426/us-president-assassination
s-attempts/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

I've never freaked out about it. You're a little soy filled pussy.

I've archived every death threat you've made though. Just to make your own life difficult if anything were to happen.

But you go right on fantasizing about all the ways the world is going to save you from Trump.

You need to get creative now because almost all of those things the Media told you were going to save you have failed and you've only got a few more left, which are going to fail.

Tick Tock

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Thursday, May 9, 2024 7:21 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I've never freaked out about it. You're a little soy filled pussy.

I've archived every death threat you've made though. Just to make your own life difficult if anything were to happen.

But you go right on fantasizing about all the ways the world is going to save you from Trump.

You need to get creative now because almost all of those things the Media told you were going to save you have failed and you've only got a few more left, which are going to fail.

Tick Tock

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

6ix, everything you do points to you being crazy, but you don't see it. Same with Trump. That guy is out of his mind, but you don't see it. Your futures together are going to be filled with trouble because of the way you act. But you can't see that it is your fault. You have to shift the blame to Democrats for persecuting you or claim you are not in trouble. Trumptards are drunks who insist their highs, their intoxication with Trump, isn't interfering with their life.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 9, 2024 10:43 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I've never freaked out about it. You're a little soy filled pussy.

I've archived every death threat you've made though. Just to make your own life difficult if anything were to happen.

But you go right on fantasizing about all the ways the world is going to save you from Trump.

You need to get creative now because almost all of those things the Media told you were going to save you have failed and you've only got a few more left, which are going to fail.

Tick Tock

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
6ix, everything you do points to you being crazy, but you don't see it. Same with Trump. That guy is out of his mind, but you don't see it. Your futures together are going to be filled with trouble because of the way you act. But you can't see that it is your fault. You have to shift the blame to Democrats for persecuting you or claim you are not in trouble. Trumptards are drunks who insist their highs, their intoxication with Trump, isn't interfering with their life.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Oh.. It's your future too.

Because...

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Wednesday, May 22, 2024 7:25 PM

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Thursday, May 23, 2024 12:08 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

old Joe and Kamala, have they destroyed the party?

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Thursday, May 23, 2024 10:26 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
old Joe and Kamala, have they destroyed the party?

No. They were already destroying themselves long before Biden* was sworn in.

They are the reason that states like Washington and New Hampshire are now in play for Trump though.

I'm sure the 2 huge spikes in gas prices this week aren't helping matters any, when 60% of Americans are cutting back or quitting fast food because places like McDonalds have become unaffordable for anybody who isn't making over $100k per year.

Tick Tock

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Thursday, May 23, 2024 10:32 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan Aren’t Hiding the Bad Blood Between Them

By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern | May 23, 2024, 6:18 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/supreme-court-samuel-alito
-elena-kagan-bad-blood.html

On Thursday, the Supreme Court dealt yet another major blow to the voting rights of Black Americans. The court’s 6–3 opinion in Alexander v. NAACP greenlighted the South Carolina legislature’s decision to shuffle Black residents out of a competitive congressional district to shore up its Republican lean. After a lengthy hearing, a district court found that the GOP-controlled legislature targeted Black South Carolinians, diminishing their voting power in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Now, however, SCOTUS’ conservative supermajority has absolved the legislature of racist intent, reshaping the law to make it near-impossible for voting rights advocates to win racial gerrymandering claims.

This is the same Justice Alito who, less than 24 hours earlier, was caught out flying a stop-the-steal Jan. 6 flag. And there he was, on the bench, handing down a decision that he penned. It was a decision that set aside mountains of actual fact-finding by the district court, because Alito just decided, well, all those facts are wrong.

Until now, the Supreme Court has reviewed those decisions on what’s called “clear error,” which is a fancy way of saying that unless the lower court obviously messed up, you should give deference to their findings. Why? Because they were the ones sitting in the courtroom listening, witnessing, looking at the evidence, and deciding the case on the very complex facts and law and math and geography that are unique to every redistricting case. Alito essentially overturned that principle of deference. He did so based on what he calls the “presumption of legislative good faith” — “the presumption of white racial innocence.”

Alito says, in short, that courts should pretty much never find that state legislatures acted with racist intent, because they are owed this presumption of good faith that cuts in their favor. And he just makes up the reasons why—he’s just pulling it out of his pocket. Alito says: First, state legislators are bound by an oath to the Constitution, and we should assume they’re following that oath. Second, when we accuse state legislators of doing race-based redistricting, we’re accusing them of “offensive and demeaning conduct” that bears a “resemblance to political apartheid,” and “we should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.” Finally, he says we should be wary of voting rights plaintiffs “who seek to transform federal courts into weapons of political warfare” through racial gerrymandering claims.

So overall, he’s saying it hurts the feelings of state legislators to accuse them of racial gerrymandering. It’s so mean that courts should close their eyes to evidence of racist redistricting and give legislators a benefit of the doubt that they do not deserve and have not earned. All to ensure that the actual victims of their handiwork, the plaintiffs who are bringing this case, cannot cynically manipulate the courts into a tool of political warfare to win more Democratic representation in Congress.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 23, 2024 10:43 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
old Joe and Kamala, have they destroyed the party?

No. They were already destroying themselves long before Biden* was sworn in.

They are the reason that states like Washington and New Hampshire are now in play for Trump though.

I'm sure the 2 huge spikes in gas prices this week aren't helping matters any, when 60% of Americans are cutting back or quitting fast food because places like McDonalds have become unaffordable for anybody who isn't making over $100k per year.

Tick Tock

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

OH NOEZ!!!!!

Axios is turning on Joe Biden* after 3.5 years of blowing him.

Biden's fast food problem

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/23/biden-fast-food-prices-wages-economy

When Axios is writing articles calling it "Biden's fast food problem", this presidency is over.

Joe Biden* is fucked.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Thursday, May 23, 2024 10:49 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
. . . when 60% of Americans are cutting back or quitting fast food because places like McDonalds have become unaffordable for anybody who isn't making over $100k per year.

Behold the latest deep dive from Axios about Joe Biden's economic troubles:

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/23/biden-fast-food-prices-wages-economy

Credit where it's due: the numbers are correct. But come on. Is it really plausible that Biden's big problem is that fast food prices are up 3.8% compared to wages?

Biden has three problems, ranked from biggest to smallest:

1 Fox News etc. have run a scorched earth campaign of lies about how the economy has collapsed since Biden's inauguration. This is displayed pretty obviously by polls showing huge differences in economic outlook between Democrats and Republicans.

2 The left has joined with the right because their very existence seems to hinge on convincing everyone that poor people are worse off than ever.

3 The press is biased against good news—which is admittedly boring—and seems to be really reluctant to report on our current favorable economic climate. I'm not sure why.

That's about it. Slight real increases in Big Mac prices are not the problem.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, May 27, 2024 7:18 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Paradox of Tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance, not as a moral standard, but as a social contract. If someone does not abide by the terms of the contract, then they are not covered by it.

In other words: The intolerant are not following the rules of the social contract of mutual tolerance.
Since they have broken the terms of the contract, they are no longer covered by the contract, and their intolerance should NOT be tolerated.

https://imgur.com/gallery/paradox-of-tolerance-ChYreg4

https://imgur.com/gallery/m2SJ9Jd

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, June 3, 2024 4:13 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The time for Biden to show restraint has long since passed.

Trump was just unanimously convicted by a jury of his peers for election interference. He had his hapless fixer pay off Daniels not “for personal gain,” as the Biden campaign statement alleges, but to defraud the American people, to deprive them of the information that they needed to make an informed decision on Election Day 2016 and to illegitimately obtain the most powerful office in the world on behalf of the country’s far right. Donald Trump covered up his affair with Daniels so he could appoint Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. He committed felonies so that the insurrectionists at the reactionary Heritage Foundation could rewrite the nation’s tax laws to make rich people richer. And so on.

Biden likes to repeat the canned phrase “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative”—a motto he attributes to his father and which is about as edgy as a mid-aughts Verizon Guy commercial. But what the hush money case demonstrates clearly is that Trump is a genuinely terrible human being. What kind of man has unprotected sex with an adult film star while his wife is home recovering from labor and delivery and caring for an infant? What kind of terrible employer has an underling borrow against his own home to cover up his boss’s sordid lies and extramarital affairs?

For years, leading Democrats have danced around a truly blunt assessment of Trump without ever coming out and saying it directly: The man is an evil, amoral cretin willing to betray those closest to him without a second thought. Find some coded language that can puncture the epistemic closure of conservative evangelical Christians. Call him the worst person in the entire country, which is basically what he is. Tap into the robust public opinion of the majorities who believe that extramarital affairs are morally wrong by asking: “If Melania can’t trust him, why should you?”

Whatever path they choose requires departing from the warmth and safety of “No one is above the law” framing. Letting the conviction more or less speak for itself is a conservative strategy that would make sense if Biden were decisively leading the race and wanted to avoid unforced errors. But as hard as it might be for everyone in the White House to accept, the president’s campaign is clearly trailing, according to public opinion polling. Yes, the margins are narrow, but if the election were held tomorrow, it is more likely than not that Donald Trump would win it. You can’t run out the clock when you’re losing. And that means that Biden needs to go on the offensive, just like dozens of leading Democratic officials and strategists are asking him to.

Yet Biden and his team clearly feel that having Biden stay out of the whole thing can help legitimize the prosecutions and whatever verdicts follow. This is wishful thinking. Take one fleeting glance at how people on the right are reacting to Trump’s conviction—that should be sufficient to disabuse the White House of the notion that there is anything it could possibly do to reach hardcore MAGA voters. Former Fox anchor Megyn Kelly promised prosecutions of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for unnamed offenses: “We’re going to have to look at what the statutes of limitations are on the various crimes they surely committed, “ she intoned. Charlie Kirk, the young MAGA media superstar, implored his followers to “indict the left, or lose America.” Donations to the Trump campaign surged. Nearly all Republican officeholders deemed the verdict somehow illegitimate. In other words, keeping the Trump prosecutions at arm’s length earned Biden precisely nothing from the right, which has existed in a state of continuous rage for so long that it does not have any other emotional register to draw upon.

More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/trump-president-biden-felo
n-alvin-bragg-democrats.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 18, 2024 10:18 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Pascal's Wager Triangle

https://xkcd.com/2947

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, June 21, 2024 2:38 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Biden should welcome their “hatred”

By Robert Reich | Jun 20, 2024

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/biden-must-welcome-their-hatred

Advice for Joe in his first debate with the convicted felon — one week from tonight.

I have only one morsel of advice to Joe Biden as he prepares for his first debate with Trump, one week from tonight: Channel Franklin D. Roosevelt by excoriating corporate America and explaining that Trump is a flack for the moneyed interests.

Eighty-eight years ago this month, on June 27, 1936, Roosevelt delivered his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president. That happens to be the same day Joe Biden will be debating Donald Trump.

FDR’s speech is as relevant today as it was then. We’re at a time like the 1930s, when the super-wealthy and big corporations were seeking to oust an incumbent Democrat who was working for the people rather than for them.

On June 27, 1936, FDR dubbed the moneyed interests “economic royalists” who “governed without the consent of the governed” and “put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power.”

They used their economic power, FDR charged, to create “a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction … The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor — these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship.”

He warned against giving these economic royalists the political power they craved.

“If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

Then, on the eve of his second election — on October 31, 1936 — FDR delivered his coup de grace, explaining the stakes in his fight with the moneyed interests.

Quote:
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”

Today’s economic royalists are backing Trump, and the fight is much the same.

The high mavens of Silicon Valley held a fundraiser for him last week. The Business Roundtable (the voice of big corporations in Washington) is preparing to pump an eight-figure sum into the Trump campaign.

Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of the biggest and most influential bank in the United States and for years the spokesman for corporate America, is coming around to Trump. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, is turning his X platform into a weaponized outlet for Trump.

Trump has asked the robber barons of Big Oil for $1 billion as an advance quid pro quo for rolling back environmental regulations. Miriam Adelson, heir to the casino magnate, has pledged $100 million to Trump.

Today’s moneyed interests are far richer in proportion to average Americans and the American economy as a whole than they were when FDR took them on. Corporate profits are near record levels, and many big corporations are keeping prices high in order to reap even more. CEO pay is through the stratosphere. The stock market is hitting record highs.

The moneyed interests have done wonderfully well under Joe Biden, despite Biden’s support for labor unions and his crackdown on monopolies.

But it’s apparently not enough for them. They want additional tax cuts and regulation rollbacks and are willing to support Trump — and flush democracy down the toilet — in order to get them.

They are also more politically potent today than they were in the 1930s, when the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression had discredited them.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to pose as a hero of the working class who will fight for average working people. He is not, of course. He is a stooge of the moneyed interests.

Which makes it doubly important for Biden to channel FDR a week from tonight and speak the truth — that only once before, 88 years ago, have the moneyed interests been so united against one candidate as they stand today against Joe Biden.

They hate Biden — and Biden should welcome their hatred.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, June 25, 2024 12:20 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

Californians With No Driver’s License Or SSN Can Use A Credit Card Or Gym Membership To Vote

https://thefederalist.com/2024/06/25/californians-with-no-drivers-lice
nse-or-ssn-can-use-a-credit-card-or-gym-membership-to-vote/

French President Emmanuel Macron warns of ‘civil war’ if far left or far right wins

https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-civil-war-far-right-na
tional-rally-far-left-france-unbowed-france-elections/

Canada supports Guyana in border controversy with Venezuela

https://guyanachronicle.com/2024/06/24/canada-supports-guyana-in-borde
r-controversy-with-venezuela/

Analysis: Why more Southeast Asian countries have signalled interest to join BRICS

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/brics-malaysia-thailand-indonesia
-bloc-asean-4426441

President Joe Biden 'appalled' by violence during pro-Palestinian protest at Los Angeles synagogue

https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-los-angeles-synagogue-p
rotest-cc997c3116d12f159df138a0ba9be002

Afghan girls accuse Taliban of sexual assault after arrests for ‘bad hijab’

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/jun/25/afg
han-women-girls-accuse-taliban-sexual-assault-after-arrests-bad-hijab-suicide

Ship ablaze after attack by Yemeni Houthis: report
https://www.sheppnews.com.au/world/ship-ablaze-after-attack-by-yemeni-
houthis-report/
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations says a Palau-flagged cargo ship has been evacuated and the vessel is on fire

US State Department Adds Belarus To List Of Countries Sponsoring Human Trafficking
https://charter97.org/en/news/2024/6/25/600273/

Putin's hypersonic missile warship displays huge 'Z' sign as it enters Cuba
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/putins-hypersonic-missile-war
ship-displays-33015541

Time line of tensions over Iran's nuclear program ahead of presidential election
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/long-fraught-time-line-
tensions-irans-nuclear-program-111393352

Putin Shows He Can Antagonize the U.S. Far Afield From Ukraine
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/world/europe/putin-russia-north-kor
ea.html

South Korea ‘preparing for worst’ as Kim Jong-un 'encouraged' by Vladimir Putin support
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1915166/south-korea-kim-jong-un-n
orth-korea-vladimir-putin

Former Fundraiser Who Helped Raise Millions for Obama Leaves Democrat Party, Declares Support for Trump

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/06/23/former-fundraiser-obama-
leaves-democrat-party-supports-trump/

CNN’s Van Jones Sounds Alarm for Dems – Says the ‘Obama-Biden Coalition’ is Falling Apart

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Tuesday, June 25, 2024 2:19 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Biden should welcome their “hatred”

By Robert Reich | Jun 20, 2024

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/biden-must-welcome-their-hatred

Advice for Joe in his first debate with the convicted felon — one week from tonight.

I have only one morsel of advice to Joe Biden as he prepares for his first debate with Trump, one week from tonight: Channel Franklin D. Roosevelt by excoriating corporate America and explaining that Trump is a flack for the moneyed interests.

Eighty-eight years ago this month, on June 27, 1936, Roosevelt delivered his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president. That happens to be the same day Joe Biden will be debating Donald Trump.

FDR’s speech is as relevant today as it was then. We’re at a time like the 1930s, when the super-wealthy and big corporations were seeking to oust an incumbent Democrat who was working for the people rather than for them.

On June 27, 1936, FDR dubbed the moneyed interests “economic royalists” who “governed without the consent of the governed” and “put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power.”

They used their economic power, FDR charged, to create “a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction … The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor — these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship.”

He warned against giving these economic royalists the political power they craved.

“If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”

Then, on the eve of his second election — on October 31, 1936 — FDR delivered his coup de grace, explaining the stakes in his fight with the moneyed interests.
Quote:
“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.”
Today’s economic royalists are backing Trump, and the fight is much the same.

The high mavens of Silicon Valley held a fundraiser for him last week. The Business Roundtable (the voice of big corporations in Washington) is preparing to pump an eight-figure sum into the Trump campaign.

Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of the biggest and most influential bank in the United States and for years the spokesman for corporate America, is coming around to Trump. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, is turning his X platform into a weaponized outlet for Trump.

Trump has asked the robber barons of Big Oil for $1 billion as an advance quid pro quo for rolling back environmental regulations. Miriam Adelson, heir to the casino magnate, has pledged $100 million to Trump.

Today’s moneyed interests are far richer in proportion to average Americans and the American economy as a whole than they were when FDR took them on. Corporate profits are near record levels, and many big corporations are keeping prices high in order to reap even more. CEO pay is through the stratosphere. The stock market is hitting record highs.

The moneyed interests have done wonderfully well under Joe Biden, despite Biden’s support for labor unions and his crackdown on monopolies.

But it’s apparently not enough for them. They want additional tax cuts and regulation rollbacks and are willing to support Trump — and flush democracy down the toilet — in order to get them.

They are also more politically potent today than they were in the 1930s, when the Great Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression had discredited them.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to pose as a hero of the working class who will fight for average working people. He is not, of course. He is a stooge of the moneyed interests.

Which makes it doubly important for Biden to channel FDR a week from tonight and speak the truth — that only once before, 88 years ago, have the moneyed interests been so united against one candidate as they stand today against Joe Biden.

They hate Biden — and Biden should welcome their hatred.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

That's all well and good, Robert. But it was your guy who fucked up the economy and put himself in this position in the first place.

It's why he's tied in Virginia and Minnesota.

Tick Tock

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Monday, July 1, 2024 8:11 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's all well and good, Robert. But it was your guy who fucked up the economy and put himself in this position in the first place.

It's why he's tied in Virginia and Minnesota.

Tick Tock

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

There you go again, blaming personal financial problems on the President. A specific example is 6ixStringJack dropping out of the work force. Now he can only spend a few thousand dollars per year and depends on charity for healthcare. Another example: I got a Trumptard a job at ZXP starting the first Monday of 2024. He buys a Mercedes for $10,000 and it is justified based on the promotion he is given after a month. By the end of the next month he has been fired because he is an asshole whenever he receives a tiny amount of authority. The Mercedes was repossessed.

America is prospering. Assholes living in America are not prospering. No President can compensate for what stupid Americans do to themselves.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, July 1, 2024 8:12 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Democrats say Trump is an existential threat. They’re not acting like it.

If the stakes of the 2024 election are as great as the party says, there’s no excuse for inaction.

By Bryan Walsh | Jul 1, 2024, 6:15 AM CDT

https://www.vox.com/today-explained-newsletter/358061/democrats-biden-
trump-existential-threat-democracy-debate

The Democratic Party has a remarkably singular message: Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country.

For the Biden campaign, the existential threat to democracy has become the overriding theme in his bid for reelection. “There is one existential threat: It’s Donald Trump,” Biden said at a fundraiser in February.

For the environmental activists in the party, climate change is the existential concern, and a Trump victory would be devastating for the planet, as Biden himself argued at Thursday’s debate: “The only existential threat to humanity is climate change, and [Trump] didn’t do a damn thing about it.”

Reproductive rights, too, are cast in existential terms. “Trump poses an existential threat to abortion rights in Pennsylvania,” Democratic US Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon said at a press conference in April. “If given the chance, he will ban abortion across the country with or without Congress.”

Existential math

As it happens, I know a little bit about existential threats, having written a book in 2019 on the subject. It refers to those threats that could conceivably risk the extinction or widespread destruction of humanity.

The real way to tell the difference between an existential threat and a more ordinary one is not what people warning say, it’s what they do. Existential threats demand existential responses. After all, if you conceivably felt the country and perhaps even the world were truly at risk, you’d presumably do everything you could to prevent that catastrophe.

When it comes to the Democrats and the left — from the Biden campaign on down to the activists — it is impossible to look at what they’re doing and conclude that they truly believe Donald Trump is an existential threat.

The nature of an existential threat is that everything else — feelings, ambition, everything — is put aside. Yet even as the chance of a second Trump presidency rises by the day, the Democratic political establishment does nothing. That’s not how you act in the face of an existential threat.

Existential until it isn’t

It’s not just politicians, though. The winners of presidential elections pick Supreme Court justices, and it was obvious that a then-83-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg might not make it through the next presidential term after the 2016 election, potentially imperiling abortion rights, among other Democratic priorities. Yet Ginsburg — buoyed by a number of Democratic supporters who viewed calls for her retirement as sexist — refused to step down. We all know what happened later.

One would think that sitting Democratic justices would have learned from Ginsburg’s example and acted differently in the face of a new supposedly existential threat from Trump. Yet Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — who are 70 and 64, respectively — have so far refused to heed increasingly desperate calls from writers like my colleague Ian Milhiser to step down and lock in their seats for decades. Each has perfectly good reasons to stay on, as did Ginsburg; none of those reasons make sense in the face of a true existential threat.

Nowhere is the gap between existential rhetoric and existential action greater than in climate change, which has emerged in recent years as one of the top priorities for Democrats.

You can’t find a climate activist — and, increasingly, a Democratic politician — who doesn’t frame climate change as an existential issue. With reason — the worst-case climate scenarios really do represent something like an existential threat to the future of not just the US, but the entire world. And given Trump’s determined opposition to actual climate policy, it’s fair to view his potential return to the White House as a part of that threat.

Yet there is a clear and yawning gap between climate rhetoric and climate action. On the Democratic political side, that’s perhaps understandable; climate change is not a top priority for most voters, and politicians have to grapple with that fact. (You can’t save the Earth if you don’t have the votes.)

Too often, though, climate activists and groups end up opposing many of the new energy projects that are needed to actually decarbonize energy, from transmission lines to solar projects to wind power, often tying them up in years of litigation. The Sunrise Movement, one of the most radical climate activist groups out there, has bafflingly withheld its endorsement from Biden so far, even though he prioritized passage of the most ambitious climate bill in US history.

The groups have reasons for what they’re doing — there are always reasons — but if climate change were treated as the existential threat the loudest activists say it is, those reasons wouldn’t matter.

Do you believe what you say?

Treating an existential threat as existential requires the one thing that the Democratic coalition has increasingly struggled to do: prioritization. It means putting aside personal feelings, individual ambition, and subjective preferences in favor of a single goal: success. Otherwise, it’s just empty rhetoric.

Download a free copy of Bryan Walsh’s End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Bryan+Walsh

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, July 1, 2024 2:24 PM